Читать книгу Some Girls Do - Margaret Leroy - Страница 6

In the past few years, US ‘close relationships researchers’ have looked at our courtship scripts – the behaviour we expect of ourselves and others when we go on a date. The results of their studies confirm that tradition still shapes our behaviour right at the start of our sexual relationships.

Psychologists Suzanna Rose and Irene Friez asked men and women to list the things they’d expect to do as they prepared for a date with someone new, and through the evening.² They found that men and women largely agreed on the scripts. On a first date a woman expects to: tell her friends and family, check her appearance, wait for the man, welcome him to her home and introduce her parents or room-mates, keep the conversation going and control the rate of sexual intimacy. A man expects to: ask the woman for a date, decide what to do, prepare his car and flat, check his money, go to the woman’s house, meet her parents or room-mates, open the car door, pay, initiate sexual contact, take her home, and tell her he’ll be in touch. Here, men are making the arrangements and taking the sexual initiatives, while women set the scene and have a right of veto – they worry about what to wear and what to say, and they tell him when to stop. In their commentary, Rose and Friez acknowledge that ‘many young women today pay date expenses, and a majority of young men report having been asked for a date by a woman’. But the more dating experience the participants had, the more important they felt it was to stick to the time-honoured roles.

Other researchers have found the same. According to psychologist Susan Sprecher, men are still much more likely than women to take direct steps – to ask the other out, plan what to do on the first date, pay, and initiate the second date.³ Susan Green and Philip Sandos found that both men and women feel it’s more acceptable for the man to take the initiative – whether he’s simply starting a conversation or asking a person out.⁴

Less academic writers reiterate the theme. In her book Hot and Bothered, a ‘guide to sexual etiquette in the 1990s’, based on hundreds of interviews with men and women in Canada, Wendy Dennis says she’s found that women still aren’t taking the lead at the start of relationships. ‘Most women realize that many men still find the notion of a sexually assertive woman distasteful,’ she writes.⁵

US writer and researcher Warren Farrell runs mixed workshops on gender issues. In his book, Why Men Are The Way They Are, he describes how he asks people to simulate meeting at a party. He says, ‘That’s how I discovered how rare it is for a woman ever to take the hand of a man who had never before taken her hand, or to kiss a man for the very first time, or to take any of the hundred and fifty initiatives between eye contact and sexual contact I found are typically expected of a man if the relationship is ever to be sexual.’⁶